Analysis of Flight Data for Airborne Networks Design

Communication services during flights are still rare and very expensive.
Direct users' connectivity to terrestrial or satellite networking is not feasible, so the study of Airborne Networking with local on-board access is receiving the attention from Airlines and Civil Aviation Authorities.
The available solutions are based on Satellite Networking and some experimental as well as real system have been developed and adopted by Airline Companies. But use of satellites has several limitations, at most the high communication costs charged to constumers and not so high data rate, even if it can provide a connectivity coverage regardless of the actual position of the aircraft within its route. Moreover it's a solution not specifically designed for flight connectivity coverage: in fact it guarantees air connectivity just as a consequence from providing connectivity coverage of the entre Earth surface.
This solution exploits signal fire-direction mechanisms: satellites receive communication data from flying airplanes and re-direct them to base stations on the Earth. These last interface with usual terrestrial networks.
The novel solution proposed in this thesis is called Airborne Networking: it aims to satisfy the goal of providing connecticity on board of airplines, by using only flying airplanes. Thus avoiding use of satellites. Flight coverage connectivity instead of surface coverage connectivity is the only target. Therefore Airborne Networking approach causes the need to design, create and manage a network among flying airplanes with airports that act as access points or gateways to terrestrial networks. The resulting network will be dynamic with continuous and frequent changes in topology, but it can guarantee faster communication speed with higher data rate, low propagation delaytime and low latency time, as well as lower costs than the previous solution.
This thesis presents a feasibility study on Airborne Networking: it analyses real flight data to provide an Airborne Network Design, throught connectivity statistic results coming out from simulations based on a specially developed localization software and real flight data.
The Airspace scenario is investigated, as weel as the characteristics, contraints and requirements that flying airplanes introduce and that need to be satisfied by resulting Airborne Network. Italian Airspace is the reference scenario choosen as real-case environment.
Satellites networking is briefly explained with its characteristics and limitations, for a deep and comprehensive discussion of the problem. Also some real experimental satellite solutions are presented.

The main part of this work presents the software created to solve the problem of managing the connectivity among flying airplanes and the analysis of its simulation results. In fact, Flight Coverage Problem can be divided in two subproblems.
The first subproblem consists of localizing all flying airplanes in order to determine if connectivity paths can be established. The Localization Software is described in detail and the main functions that manage network connectivity are step-by-step explained. Connectivity data and statistic data are stored in MySQL databases. Also some software optional functions are explained.
Moreover, a visualization tool has been created to show the network connectivity trend on flight routes. The software has been simulated with real data and resulting charts/histograms are reported and analyzed.
The second subproblem consists of indentifying or designing a routing protocol that is able to efficiently deviver communication data through Airborne Networks. In this thesis is presented a wide overview of State-of-the-Art Routing Protocols. All the considerations are then collected for an Airborne Network Design. Wireless Mobile Mesh Networks has been individuated as possible reference network type, and routing protocols suitable for it have been addressed in detail.

In appendix we discuss the U.S. AirForce Airborne Networking solution.
U.S. AirForce has developed a solution to provide military connectivity among devices and vehicles operating in a war-theatre, through the use of flying airplanes. However both the system and the goal are different from those that are topic of this work. U.S. solution proposes Airborne Networks as an intermediate level between satellites and mobile military devices to provide a surface connectivity, but faster and more economic.